Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates believes ChatGPT, a chatbot that gives strikingly human-like responses to user queries, is as significant as the invention of the internet, he told German business daily Handelsblatt in an interview.

“Until now, artificial intelligence could read and write, but could not understand the content. The new programs like ChatGPT will make many office jobs more efficient by helping to write invoices or letters. This will change our world,” he said.

ChatGPT, developed by US firm OpenAI and backed by Microsoft Corp, has been rated the fastest-growing consumer app in history.

The chatbot has forced Big Tech firms to get their act together with respect to advancements in the AI space.

Google, the world’s largest search engine, will make artificial intelligence-based large language models like LaMDA available “in the coming weeks and months”, according to chief executive officer Sundar Pichai.

OpenAI on February 1, launched a paid version of ChatGPT. The subscription include features such as general access to ChatGPT, even during peak times; faster response times; priority access to new features and improvements.

The paid version of the AI chatbot can be availed for $20 per month.Currently, ChatGPT Plus is available only to users in the United States. OpenAI said it will begin the process of inviting people waitlist over the coming weeks.

“We plan to expand access and support to additional countries and regions soon,” the company said in a post.

Bard‘s costly mistake

Alphabet’s shares tanked more than 9% during regular trading on Thursday, wiping off $100 billion off of its market cap, after a report emerged pointing to a factual error made by its newly launched AI chatbot Bard.

The error was highlighted in a report by news agency Reuters.

The company posted a GIF of its new AI Bard in action which showed the chatbot giving a factually inaccurate response to a prompt.

In the GIF, the chatbot is prompted, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?”

Bard responded with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets.

This is where it went wrong as the first pictures of exoplanets were, however, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

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